You have probably seen the number: an attention span of a few seconds, shrinking every year, shorter than a goldfish's. It is repeated everywhere and it tends to leave people feeling quietly broken.
The most solid figure available is about 47 seconds, and it does not mean what that sentence suggests. Here is what it measures, what it does not, and what the research supports instead.
How long is the average person's attention span?
About 47 seconds is the best-supported number, but it describes something narrower than "attention span".
Gloria Mark, a researcher at UC Irvine, reports in her book Attention Span (2023) that in her recent studies the average attention on a single screen before switching was about 47 seconds.
Read that carefully. It is the average time on a single screen before switching. It is a measure of switching, not of capacity.
Source: Gloria Mark, Attention Span (2023).
Is 47 seconds the longest a person can focus?
No. People read books, follow a film or work through a hard problem for far longer than 47 seconds.
The number tells you how often attention gets interrupted or moves on when a screen is involved. Some of those switches are chosen, some are pulled by notifications, and some are habit. One observational study of real-life smartphone use found that about 89% of smartphone interactions were started by the user rather than prompted by a notification. So a good share of the switching begins with us reaching, not with the phone buzzing.
That is not a character flaw. It is what a device built to be checked produces.
Source: Heitmayer & Lahlou (2021), Computers in Human Behavior.
What is the average attention span by age?
There is no figure I can honestly give you.
Charts that list a number of minutes for each year of age are everywhere online, and none of the research I rely on supports them. Attention depends heavily on what you are doing, how interested you are, how rested you are and what is competing for you. A child absorbed in a building project can stay with it for a long time, and an adult in a dull meeting may not last five minutes.
What I can say from research is narrower. Attention does change with age, and one trial used that as a yardstick: the improvement in sustained attention after two weeks without mobile internet was comparable to about 10 years of age-related decline. That is a comparison, not an age table.
Source: Castelo et al. (2025), PNAS Nexus.
How long is attention span for adults, really?
It varies by the minute, which is the honest answer and a less satisfying one.
One well-known study sampled people's experiences through the day and found that minds wandered about 47% of the time, and that people were less happy when they did. That coincidence of numbers is easy to mix up with Mark's 47 seconds, but they measure different things: one is how often thoughts drift, the other is how long people stay on one screen.
Both point the same way, though. Attention is not a fixed length that you either have or lack. It drifts and gets pulled, all day, for everyone.
Source: Killingsworth & Gilbert (2010), Science.
Are attention spans actually getting shorter?
I cannot show you a clean before-and-after that proves it, and I would be wary of anyone who says they can. What the research does show is a set of links between how we use phones and how attention behaves.
- Short-form video. A 2025 meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin pooled 71 studies and about 98,299 people. Heavier short-form video use was linked to poorer attention and, most strongly, poorer inhibitory control. It is correlational, so it cannot say which causes which.
- Heavy multitasking. Ophir, Nass and Wagner (2009) found that heavy media multitaskers did worse on task-switching and filtering tests than light ones. Again, an association.
- Notifications. A study of focus on a Stroop task found that social media notifications caused a brief slowdown in processing. The size of the effect tracked notification volume and checking habits rather than total screen time.
Sources: Nguyen et al. (2025), Psychological Bulletin; Ophir, Nass & Wagner (2009), PNAS; Fournier et al., "Attention hijacked," Computers in Human Behavior.
Put together, the fair reading is that attention is linked to the environment we keep it in. That is different from saying it has permanently shrunk.
Can your attention span improve?
There is a randomised trial that says yes, over a short time.
Castelo and colleagues blocked mobile internet on the phones of 467 participants for two weeks. Calls and texts still worked. Sustained attention improved, as did mental health and subjective well-being, and increased nightly sleep was one of the mechanisms. The size of the attention change was comparable to about 10 years of age-related decline.
That is a notable result for a fortnight. My own reading, which the trial does not directly test, is that some of what feels like a weak attention span may be tied to phone habits.
A smaller point from one study: Ward and colleagues (2017) found that people did best on working-memory and fluid-intelligence tests with their phone in another room, and worst with it on the desk, even when it was silenced and unused. Later replications found smaller or mixed effects, so treat it as suggestive, not settled.
Sources: Castelo et al. (2025); Ward, Duke, Gneezy & Bos (2017), Journal of the Association for Consumer Research.
What is worth doing with the number?
Not worrying about it, mostly. A few practical points follow.
- Stop comparing yourself to 47 seconds. It is an average of switching behaviour on screens, not a score you are meant to beat.
- Measure your own. Notice how long you stay with one thing before you reach for something else. That is your real figure, and it is more useful than a statistic.
- Change the environment first. Muting notifications and moving the phone out of reach are the cheapest experiments to try.
- Give it a couple of weeks. The trial result came after two weeks, not two days.
If you want help with the gap that opens when you stop reaching, Boredom's Daily Reset is three guided minutes for exactly that moment. It is optional, and the changes above work without it.
The short version
The figure you keep seeing, about 47 seconds, is how long people stayed on one screen before switching in Gloria Mark's studies. It is not the limit of your focus, and it is not a verdict on you.
There is no honest number by age, and attention moves with the task and the setting. What the research does support is that the setting matters: in one randomised trial, two weeks without mobile internet improved sustained attention.